New York, N.Y. – Dec. 16, 2011 – ProPublica today announced that Nikole Hannah-Jones of The Oregonian will be joining its award-winning newsroom as a reporter on Dec. 19. She will be covering the ongoing economic downturn and how it has impacted the average American.
Hannah-Jones has been with The Oregonian since 2006, focusing on governmental issues, the census as well as race and ethnicity. Her latest stories exposed significant shortcomings in the enforcement of fair housing laws in Portland, and eventually prompted officials to draft the city’s first fair housing plan.
Before The Oregonian, Hannah-Jones was a reporter at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., where she covered school equity and the racial achievement gap. Since then, she has won the Society of Professional Journalists Pacific Northwest Excellence in Journalism Award three times and participated in reporting fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania and Poynter Institute, among others.
“Nikole is a skilled writer and reporter whose work has been informed from her time spent living in the East, West, South and Midwest,” said ProPublica managing editor Stephen Engelberg. “She will be focusing on an area that continues to grow in importance—the plight of the disadvantaged.” Ms. Hannah-Jones’s work at ProPublica will be supported by a new grant from the Ford Foundation.
“I’m excited to work for ProPublica and continue on a national scale the work that I got into journalism to do: Reveal the plight of the powerless and hold accountable those who take advantage of them,” Hannah-Jones said.
Hannah-Jones earned her MA in mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a full-tuition Roy H. Park fellow. She attended the University of Notre Dame for her BA in history and African-American studies.
ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. In 2010, it was the first online news organization to win a Pulitzer Prize. In 2011, ProPublica won the first Pulitzer awarded to a body of work that did not appear in print. ProPublica is supported primarily by philanthropy and provides the articles it produces, free of charge, both through its own website and to leading news organizations selected with an eye toward maximizing the impact of each article.
